This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Goma, Congo’s life of violence under the volcano

For thousands of years, volcanic activity has slowly released carbon dioxide and methane into the picturesque Lake Kivu, on which Goma is built. Now it has become akin to a big bottle of soda, which can explode in something called “lake overturn.”

Most people in Goma are far more concerned about violence than the threat of a volcanic eruption. (Cai Tjeenk Willink / AP)

Trucks burned in the 2002 explosion of the Nyiragongo volcano in Congo.
Handout photo from the national volcano observatory.

By Dennis PorterSpecial to the Star

Sun., Jan. 15, 2012

GOMA, CONGO—“We heard people saying the volcano had erupted, so we had to go and see,” explains Jean-Luc, a young Congolese man.

This was in 2002, in Goma, at the eastern edge of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Lava pouring out of Mount Nyiragongo was slowly creeping toward the city.

Scientists knew it could become disastrous. But rebel groups were near the outskirts of the city, and local officials told people to stay in their homes.

“The government didn’t want people to leave from the town so that the enemy could come,” says Jean-Luc.

By the time the eruption was over, a third of Goma’s buildings were buried in lava. Luckily, the lava moved so slowly that the death toll was minimal.

Article Continued Below

But nobody knows when the next hazard may hit.

“Goma is the most dangerous city in the world,” says Dario Tedesco, who has spent 15 years studying Nyiragongo. He heads a natural disaster safety program for the United Nations and is in charge of creating an alert and evacuation plan for the area, where there is also a second active volcano, Nyamulagira. The scope of disaster has increased since 2002 with the population growing from 400,000 to 1.1. million, he says.

While scientists are able to predict an eruption weeks in advance, evacuation would not be a piece of cake. Goma is on the border with Rwanda, and during the 2002 eruption, the Rwandan government sealed the crossing, trapping people on the Congolese side.

The most frightening scenario is that the volcano won’t have a typical eruption. Instead, the veins that feed into it will actually tear apart and lava will ooze straight up from the ground. One of these veins appears to run under the heart of Goma.

Yet, another danger may be even bigger than the volcano: a killer lake.

For thousands of years, volcanic activity has slowly released carbon dioxide and methane into the picturesque Lake Kivu, on which Goma is built. Now it has become akin to a big bottle of soda, which can explode in something called “lake overturn.”

“An eruption beneath the lake, a large earthquake beneath the lake, a landslide into the lake, all of these could cause or trigger an overturn of the lake,” explains geophysicist Cynthia Ebinger. “Right now there’s no way to monitor or warn of those hazards.”

In 1986, Lake Nyos in Cameroon overturned, suffocating more than 1,000 people in the middle of the night. Scientists say this has happened in Lake Kivu in the past, possibly several times. Even though the most recent overturn was thousands of years ago, Kivu is far bigger than Nyos, so millions of people could suffocate almost instantly.

Yet, most people in Goma are far more concerned about violence. In the past two decades, they’ve endured two major wars. As recently as 2008, the city was on the verge of falling to rebels. Many of the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda still roam Congo’s forests. The major highways in and out of Goma are still controlled by their fighters.

The government has flooded Goma with troops to keep rebels at bay. But many soldiers in the national army are former rebels who committed atrocities against civilians. Their uniforms have changed, but their conduct hasn’t.

“The soldiers raped me and I got pregnant,” says a young Congolese woman. She was on her way to work when three troops dragged her into a nearby field and gang-raped her. “One of them wanted to take me to their camp. When I refused, he wanted to kill me.”

The police told her it was unsafe for them to investigate.

This may be what compounds all the other dangers: the government doesn’t seem capable of helping.

At the official Congolese volcano observatory, none of the government scientists would give their names. They claim that lava can’t come up through the ground, that it’s impossible for an earthquake to trigger a lake overturn, that Goma is completely safe. All this is refuted by Western scientists. “Completely and absolutely wrong” is how one expert dismissed some of their assurances.

One Congolese official said scientists keep quiet about dangers to avoid getting into trouble.

A worst-case scenario may be a cascading series of disasters, such as the March earthquake in Japan, which set off a tsunami, which in turn caused a nuclear crisis. In Goma, an earthquake could trigger a volcanic eruption, which could trigger a lake overturn. And any chaos could be exploited by nearby rebels.

Yet living in Goma isn’t quite suicide. With a good alert system, people may have several weeks warning before the volcano erupts. Another lake overturn may still be hundreds or thousands of years away. Even the rebel threat appears to have calmed down over the past few years.

“It’s dangerous, very dangerous, but we can still live in the city,” insists Tedesco.

And hopefully, the optimists are right — because most people in Goma are poor and don’t have a lot of other choices.

“Most of them were born here,” laments Jean-Luc. “They don’t have any place where they can go.”

Delivered dailyThe Morning Headlines Newsletter

The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E 1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com